Facebook Playing “Deal or No Deal”

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I had thought MySpace had won the SNS race.  That may not be the case.  Business Week reports that:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the
world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block,
BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held
company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much
as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the
matter say.

Well, if this is true, what a game of Deal or No Deal for the team at Facebook.

One wonders how this news leaked, though?  It’s not good for the Facebook team to set expectations at $2b.  That’s a rich target to set, and if they eventually fall short, they will look like greedy idiots.

MIT – Sloan Visit to Istanbul

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Ken Morse, the Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center, accompanied a group of Sloan Students to Turkey.  In Istanbul, they were hosted by the ARI Teknokent, the technopark project of the Istanbul Technical University.  I was invited to be a panelist yesterday in a panel discussion titled, "Istanbul: A Globally-Linked "Cool" Hub for Entrepreneurship?"  The panel was moderated by Memduh Karakullukcu, the General Manager of ARI Teknokent.  The other panelists were:

Aydin Ersoz – CEO of Innova, a leading Turkish enterprise software developer
Cemil Turun – CEO of Yogurt, an innovative software house with a focus on computer graphics
Evren Unver – General Partner at Turkven, Turkey’s only independent private equity fund

We took turns sharing with the audience our view and experiences in entrepreneurship in Turkey.  The summary of the discussion, along with the previous night’s dinner’s topics with Ken Morse, is that Turkey has inherited an entrepreneurial legacy, with Istanbul as the hub of commercial activity in the region for centuries, and right now, economic stabilization, lower interest rates, and the EU ascension plans combine to make Turkey a desirable target for capital.

The picture is fairly clear.  All stakeholders seem to agree on the main points.  Therefore, we should expect a big boom in entrepreneurial activity in Turkey, right?  🙂

We’ll see…

Two pieces of exciting news from yesterday were that Turkven has closed another deal, bringing their investments to five, and that Innova is contemplating a Turkish IPO.

VC Transparency

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I have blogged about openness here before.  I find the lack of openness to be one of the obstacles hindering Turkish entrepreneurial development; and I have made it one of the principal tenets of the Istanbul New Economy Group.

Fred Wilson is an old acquaintance from New York.  His firm Union Square Ventures is my model for a modern web-based services VC. He and his partner Brad Burnham have been discussing how they use del.icio.us to sustain a dialog with the entrepreneur community.  In their specific case:

[Fred] was also inviting all of you to shape that thinking by tagging
things in del.icio.us using the tags for:fredwilson, for:ceonyc,
for:bburnham, or more simply and perhaps more efficiently, for:usv.

In Istanbul, there are many who disagree with me on the requirement for openness.  I wanted to point out the USV practice, and recognize it as the "big deal" that Brad calls it.  Venture Capital is an industry of idea-based competition.  One can argue that closely guarding ideas will lead to success.  USV is contending that sharing them will.  I agree with them.

Mating Patterns (or the Web2.0 Harem)

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In an excellent, provocative post, Baris speculates the potential change in our mating patterns in the light of rapidly increasing search efficiency.  To support his controversial bent, I quote a highlight:

I predict a society in the near future where there will be men with
1000s of kids. Maybe in the future your blog will say “Click here to
subscribe to my blog and click here if you want to discuss obtaining my
sperm.”

You should read the whole post to get a better sense of his argument.

Freemium

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Fred Wilson had a post a couple of days ago, in which he described his favorite business model:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not,
acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth,
referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium
priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to
your customer base.

After pointing out a few examples (Skype, Flickr, Trillian, Newsgator, Box.net and Webroot, and to which, I would add Craig’s List, LinkedIn, and The Ladders), he asked for help in naming this model.

One of the suggestions he got was Freemium.

I am a big fan of the model Fred describes.  I also like the name freemium. I the interest of spreading the meme, I wanted to blog it, too.

UPDATE: After including The Ladders in the freemium category, I see that Marc Cenedella, its CEO, disagrees. 🙂

Insider’s Arithmetic on the Economics of Video Download Fees

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Here’s a basic analysis of pure-download arithmetic for mainstream TV from a TV veteran (via Martino Mingione).  I don’t think anyone’s debating what Dick Wolf’s arguing.  I’d like to look at the economics of HBO, which can obviously afford shows like The Sopranos.  It would probably be much more enlighting to analyze the download fee model looking at the HBO model.

Podcasting and Videocasting Enter Turkish Media

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In a move that’s definitely ahead of the curve, CNN Turk, has made all of its original programming available as free podcasts and videocasts.  I was pointed to this by Altan Alpay, the CEO of Podvertiser, who blogged about it yesterday.   CNN Turk is a JV between CNN International and Dogan Media Group, Turkey’s dominant media conglomerate.  There are further details on the initiative on the CNN Turk website (in Turkish).  I see this as the first signal of the forward-leaning stance for Dogan’s traditional media channels.

Joga Arrives

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Joga
On the heels of my posts on how sports, specifically football (soccer) could be the unifying factor in a MySpace-like social networking platform, came the announcement for Joga, the new social networking platform from Google and Nike.  A nice tie-in is the Joga Bonita TV campaign starring one of my heroes, Eric Cantona.  I expect Joga to capitalize on the World Cup fever.  There has to be independent plays going after this niche, too.  I am excited to see the space develop.

UPDATE: I commented on Baris’s blog on how Joga’s biggest assets (Google and Nike) will also be its biggest handicaps.